There’s a recurring movement in marketing teams that work under growth pressure. A campaign launches with high expectations. After a month, the numbers underperform. Two weeks of analysis. A new campaign with a different angle. This one launches. After a month, the numbers underperform.
And on it goes.
The calendar from a year ago, read in hindsight, shows ten, twelve, even twenty different campaigns. Each had its rationale, each had its small kickoff meeting with slides and KPIs. None substantially shifted the trajectory of the business.
The stated mistake, in these situations, is almost always the same: we haven’t found the right campaign yet. The diagnosis sounds reasonable. And the resulting cure too: test more, test faster, lower the cost of each test so you can run enough of them. It’s become a school of thought, supported by agencies and consultants. It rests on a simple idea: marketing is a problem of finding the winning combination, and iteration speed is the competitive edge.
The idea is elegant and partly true. But in many cases, applied to a company that isn’t selling enough, it’s an illusion of motion.
The reasoning I follow, when a client shows me six campaigns in nine months all underperforming, is to not look at the campaigns. I look at what they had in common. Almost always, what they had in common was the problem they were trying to solve. And that problem, almost always, was a problem of positioning, not execution.
Let me get concrete.
A mid-sized B2B consulting firm, working in digital transformation, with revenue declining for two years straight. They’d run, in sequence: a campaign on AI, one on digital transformation, one on the economic benefits of digitalisation, one with famous client testimonials, one with a new visual brand, one with a channel partner. Each campaign had its own brief, its own budget, its own team. They all generated leads. But the percentage of leads converting to customers had stayed, across all six, around 4%.
That was the number that wouldn’t move.
When they came to me, the first question wasn’t about the campaigns. It was this: who is your ideal customer today, and why do they choose you over a competitor?. A banal question, but one they hadn’t seriously stopped on for at least three years. The answer, after an hour of conversation, was confused. Some said large companies that want to modernise. Some said mid-market firms that need accompaniment. Some said industries we have specialisation in. The specialisations listed were five, and nobody could explain the difference from competitors in any way that wasn’t generic.
The problem to solve wasn’t a campaign. It was that they no longer knew, with precision, who they were for and why. The six campaigns had been six different ways of saying the same generic thing, to the same generic people, getting the same lukewarm response.
The work we did over the next six months wasn’t marketing work. It was diagnosis work. Which kind of customer, when they pay for our services, actually gets the results expected? With which kind of customer do deals close fast and rarely renegotiate? What are the three specific things we do better than competitors, for that kind of customer?
The answer to those three questions, reformulated as a three-line positioning statement, became the foundation for everything that came after.
When they ran campaigns again, six months later, the lead-to-customer conversion rate on the new target segment had moved from 4% to 19%. They hadn’t changed campaign. They’d changed problem.
There’s an uncomfortable truth in this logic. If the real problem is positioning and you keep running campaigns, the campaigns don’t just fail to work, they create the illusion that the problem lies somewhere else. The more campaigns you run, the more you convince yourself the cure is another campaign. It’s a loop that feeds itself, and many marketing teams walk it for years, losing time, budget, and sometimes careers.
When I see a marketing calendar full of campaigns and numbers that won’t move, the question I ask myself isn’t what campaign should we try next?. It’s what are we actually trying to solve?.
Often, the answer isn’t in the marketing department. It’s in a leadership conversation that’s been postponed too long, about who we are and who we’re for. When that conversation happens, marketing suddenly gets much simpler. Not because it found the formula. Because it finally knows what it’s saying, and to whom.
Changing campaign is easy, and gives the impression of motion. Changing problem is hard, and gives the impression of standing still. But that, usually, is the only way to actually start moving again.